“Take the strain.” The eight brawny Vikings on the other end of the catapult’s arm put their weight on the ropes and braced themselves for a pull. Shef felt the arm—it was the top sixteen feet of a longship’s mast, sawn off a little above deck level—flex between their weight and his, felt himself beginning to lift off the sodden ground.

“Pull!” The Vikings heaved as one, each man putting his full body-weight and back strength into it, as beautifully coordinated as if they had been heaving up a longship’s yard in an Atlantic swell. The short arm of the catapult jerked down. The long arm whipped up. The sling, whirling round with sudden, vicious force, reached the point where the free hook was pulled off its ring, and swung loose.

Up into the murky sky soared the boulder. For a long moment it seemed to pause at the top of its arc, then began the long descent to splash into the Fenland soil two hundred and fifty paces off. Already a half-score of ragged figures were racing forward at the other end of the practice range, jealously competing to seize the ball and run back with it.

“Lower away!” bellowed Shef at the top of his lungs. His crew, as always, took not the slightest notice. They whooped and cheered, beating each other on the back, watching for the fall of the shot.

“A furlong if it’s an inch!” shouted Steinulf, Brand’s helmsman.

“Lower away! This is a speed test!” bellowed Shef again. His team slowly remembered his existence. One of them, Ulf the cook, ambled round and patted Shef tenderly on the back.

“Speed test be buggered,” he said companionably. “If we ever have to shoot it fast, we will. Now—it’s time to get the food on.”

His mates nodded agreement, picked up their jackets from where they had draped them over the catapult’s gallowslike frame.

“Good fun, good shooting,” said Kolbein the Hebridean, newly sporting his Wayman pendant, the phallus of Frey. “We’ll come down again tomorrow. Time to eat.”

Shef watched them trail back toward the palisade, the cluster of tents and roughly roofed booths which were the winter camp of the Wayman army, wrath and frustration at his heart.

He had got the idea for this new-model catapult while watching Ordlaf’s fishermen hauling on their mast-ropes. The giant boulder-thrower of the monks at York, the machine that had destroyed the Ragnarssons’ ram three months before, had got its power from a counterweight. The counterweight itself was hauled into the air by men heaving at a windlass. All the counterweight really did was to store up the power the men had put into heaving on the windlass handles.